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Intel® Software Innovator Program

Developer Spotlight

Innovators of Tomorrow is a monthly feature that focuses on developers in our Intel® Software Innovator program. In this episode, we talk to Peter Ma about his incredible winning streak with hackathons. Peter discusses his inspiration for some of his projects, such as Anti-Snoozer (a device that alerts drivers who are falling asleep) and Vehicle Rear Vision (a device using an Intel® RealSense™ camera).

Featured Innovators

Justin Link of Chronosapien discusses some of the challenges from a developer's perspective that are involved in creating content for virtual reality. He shows ways that his team is changing its process to create content more efficiently, more effectively, and more collaboratively.

Read about how Paolo Moro and his team created a wingsuit flight simulator using multiple technologies including the HTC Vive*, Steam* VR SDK, and Unity* software. The user controls the flight with a joystick and wears a battery operated backpack that wirelessly creates virtual reality.

This episode features Lilli Szafranski of Lumina Labs and takes a look at her project, Stoicheia. This project combines classic antiquity and state-of-the-art technology in a digital stained-glass dodecahedron using a continuous, random software algorithm to control over 2,200 LEDs. Lilli hopes her work helps people realize that software development is not just for nerds—it is highly creative and can be quite beautiful.

Tim and Alex Porter of Underminer Studios demonstrated Confronting Fear of Heights, a virtual reality (VR) therapy tool. They also offered a hackathon challenge for the best use of Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers (Intel® GPA) to optimize developers' projects. Regarded as experts in VR optimization techniques, the Porters focused on getting people interested in playing with the foundations of virtual and augmented reality and introducing them to open source tools.

In this episode, we talk with Pedro Kayatt about his work in virtual reality. Pedro works to bring quality VR experiences to everyone by combining education and games, and by working with schools to make the technology and experience more accessible. Pedro discusses the games he is currently working on and how he and his team created Dinos do Brasil, a VR experience that takes you through the world of dinosaurs and is now a permanent exhibit at Brazil’s largest museum.

As someone who is constantly in search of more knowledge, Johnny Chan is always eager to learn and try new things. He shares what he learns with others through his blog and forum contributions to help ease the way for others who are learning new technologies. Johnny tells us a bit more about himself and his projects.

Fabrizio Lapiello is writing a series of blog posts covering IoT topics, beginning with the design of IoT devices. Part 1 introduces the topic and covers quality, time, and cost concerns, as well as the importance of target costing and concurrent engineering. Part 2 addresses the technologies and design with particular focus on product acceptance and the perspective of the end user. Part 3 discusses usability and affordance that gives guidance on the intuitiveness involved in using the product.

Intel® Software Innovators present their work on artificial intelligence at meetups across Europe demonstrating everything from the basics of machine learning and deep learning to fine-tuning techniques that can be applied to specific use cases.

In this episode, we talk with Gregor Biswanger and his Project Werner. Inspired to help his spastically disabled brother communicate, Gregor developed software that lets his brother’s facial expressions type and talk for him. This inspirational video shows the positive impact that innovation can have on real-world situations.

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Innovation Updates

Paul Langdon shows you how to build your own machine learning developer toolkit with the Intel® NUC and AWS* DeepLens. The project demonstrates the hardware setup and the installation of your first training model to implement computer vision at the edge.

Do you have what it takes to survive in this apocalyptic landscape and be the best at it? Pablo Farias Navarro created Killing Zombies with Friends, which is a local multiplayer game where players share the same VR headset.

Recently, Firmansyah Saftari developed a motion simulator platform for a virtual reality car racing game, which he demonstrated at the Gaming Laptop Promo event sponsored by Intel in Indonesia. Completing the project in just 22 days, this two-degrees-of-freedom (2DOF) simulator features an Arduino* microcontroller, a 42 inch curved UHD TV for the display, HTC Vive* VR gear, and the Project Cars VR game by Steam*.

Wonda VR makes it easier for content creators and institutions to create and share highly engaging VR learning experiences on any VR platform. Jeet Raut created Wonda VR so that anyone with a 360° camera and basic video editing skills can explore the power of VR for learning- and development-related projects. Without the need for a costly game engine developer, publishing across VR platforms becomes more affordable and accessible.

Nishant Srivastava created an Android* library that makes it simpler and easier to play with sensor events and detect gestures. The library eliminates most boilerplate code for dealing with setting up sensor-based event and gesture detection on Android. Sensey has been showcased in the Must Have Libraries List published by CodePath, the Top 5 Android Libraries by COBE, and the Best Android Libraries for Developers by CloudRAIL.

Try your hand at this web-based game of awkward physics sword fighting that Alex Schuster has set in the world of shadow puppets. This fun, fast-paced game is full of a creative cast of characters, which can make it highly addictive.

Thomas Endres and Martin Foertsch created ParrotAttacks VR—a virtual reality arcade shooter game written in Unity* 3D. Using an HTC Vive* controller, your goal is to shoot as many birds as you can before time is up. This is a follow-up to their original, gesture-controlled game, and they have plans to integrate a multiplayer node in future releases.

Omar Isaac designed Sidekick Co. as the essential AI assistant that every household needs. Similar to Siri* (from Apple*) and Alexa* (from Amazon*), Sidekick Co. takes it a step further with a creative little robot that you can see and interact with—not only answering your questions but providing some banter as well.

Daniil Budanov’s team, RoboJackets, competes annually in the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (an international robotics competition), which revolves around autonomously navigating an outdoor obstacle course. Due to the noisy and inconsistent nature of the competition environment, RoboJackets proposes to move their lane detection algorithms to a convolutional neural network using the Intel® Movidius™ Neural Compute Stick to infer boundaries based on segmentation and classification of drivable space.

The Electronic Curator is a generative adversarial network that creates vegetable face artwork and curates it. Eyal Gruss’ project examines whether a computer can not only generate art but also evaluate its quality. The painter and curator are neural networks, fed with examples of muses and portraits, that generalize the examples using generative adversarial networks. The system not only repetitively attempts to improve the painting, but also tries to understand it and generate a text description for it, and eventually grades it.

Michele Tameni attempts to ensure worker safety in manufacturing companies. She experiments with computer vision and machine learning to check live camera streams for workers who are not wearing the appropriate safety equipment. For very little effort, monitoring at the edge with a low-powered PC and a simple camera can result in big improvements in terms of workplace safety.

Konstantin Popov has used his expertise in 3D technologies to build the Cappasity platform. Cappasity is a solution that allows online retailers to easily scan their products in 3D and embed them on their website. As one of the top Intel® Software Innovators of 2016, Konstantin took some time to tell us about Cappasity and the new direction the platform is headed toward.